


The Truth

by glacis



Category: X Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-29
Updated: 2010-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:41:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glacis/pseuds/glacis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightmare as Reality.  Written in exasperation somewhere around the eighth season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Truth

_The Truth. Dedicated to all the X-Philes who gave up on logic, consistency or any plot closure from the show._

They had him! Mulder tossed and strained, fighting against his bonds. He didn't know how they'd trapped him this time, and he couldn't feel chicken wire against his face so he didn't _think_ he'd been transported back to Siberia, but it didn't feel like his couch under him. His lower body was immobilized but his hands, his hands were free! He fought from the depths of inky blackness worse than anything he'd felt since the oil aliens had set upon him, gradually surfacing to the sound of a buzzing much stronger and more frightening than any killer clone bees could ever hope to attain.

"Would you stop yelling like a cow caught in a damned tar pit and wake up, already, Fox? You're frightening the children. It's past time for you to get up and going, anyway. God knows you've managed to mess up every last thing you've done for the past year, and God _only_ knows how I'm expected to handle half a dozen kids, this house, hold down a full time job and _still_ take care of you. It's worse than having a seventh child. At least a child would pay attention and do what he's told. Get _up_, already!"

Mulder's eyes popped open. Who on Earth was calling him Fox? Nobody called him Fox. Not even his parents. When they'd been alive. To his intense shock, Scully stood at the side of the bed, fists balled at her hips, eyes squinted nearly shut, a scowl on her face and her mouth wide open as she howled at him like a villain in a bad Italian opera.

"Scully?" he asked faintly.

The howl notched up another fifty decibels. "Don't give me that! Why I ever made the mistake of marrying you, I will never know. Useless, lazy, irritating ..." The insults continued as she stomped to the door and slammed it shut behind her. The only sound to penetrate the wooden barrier was a sort of high pitched hum, as if a mosquito the size of a Great Dane was whining in his ear.

He stared at the door.

Married?

Fox?

What sort of an X File had he landed in?

The door flew open, banging against the wall and nearly sending him out of his skin. Children boiled in the room.

Red-headed children. At least a score of them if not more. And a couple brunettes.

They swarmed over him, chanting nonsensical syllables that all seemed to end in some variant of "Daddy." Mulder attempted to burrow under the covers. Three of them followed him. It was a good thing he was wearing pajamas.

Grey flannel pajamas with little long-horned cattle printed on them.

Sheer horror kept him still a fatal moment, and the intruders landed on him, three directly in his face and more on top the covers, pinning him there. Vertigo hit, and the world spun, growing dark from lack of oxygen and sheets covering his nose and mouth. He whimpered.

A foghorn with a distinctly nasal whine ended the torment. "Kids! Leave your father alone! Come get your lunches before you're late for school! If you miss the bus you're going to walk! Fox! GET OUT OF BED NOW!"

Apparently the herd of children were as cowed by Scully -- his wife ?! -- as he was, because all the little hellions flew off the bed and out the door as quickly as they'd attacked. He curled into a fetal ball under the sheets, panting and sweating.

The smack came from out of nowhere. He shot out from under the sheets, rubbing his flank, staring wild-eyed at the blue-eyed, red-haired harpy glaring at him and pointing at a suit hanging from a hook on the back of the door.

"Worse than the kids. Get up, get dressed, and get out. Don't come home until you've been to both interviews, the unemployment office, the dry cleaners to pick up my work suits, don't forget to stop by the bank and don't write any more checks without at the very least letting me know, since all you're doing lately is taking it out and I'm not a money tree."

He was in awe. She hadn't even taken a breath. "NOW!" she shrieked.

He moved.

Fifteen minutes later he'd combed his hair, knotted his tie and fumbled his way out of the bathroom. The bathroom had been a wasteland of hair care products, makeup, hand-held electrical appliances the uses of which he didn't dare guess, feminine hygiene products, bright pink hand towels and soap in the shape of little ducks.

As he walked gingerly out into the hall, he heard a strange noise. It sounded like sitar music, only flat, out of tune, and oddly distorted, as if he were hearing it during a very bad acid trip. He tip-toed to the closed door at the end of the hall and inched it open.

The sickly-sweet stench of weed nearly took his head off. There, in love beads and tie-dyed denim, eyes blissfully closed as she tortured a badly-strung sitar, was his sister.

"Samantha?" he whispered.

One eye opened. It looked like an olive floating in tomato soup, it was so bloodshot. "Hey, Foxy, chill, dude. Job tomorrow. Peace today. Give love a chance."

The eye drifted shut, and the plucking fingers picked up their torment of the strings. Mulder gulped air, immediately regretted it as his head started to buzz, and backed out of the room as quickly as he could without falling over his own feet.

Where were his fish? Where was his couch? What happened to Scully? _Sam_? Was this another case of strange clones or LSD in the water supply or alien-induced hallucinations?

Sidling into the kitchen, he saw his, er, wife. She was standing on the back porch, her back to the room, talking to someone. He snuck up a little closer.

"Could you deliver the package in an hour or so, Alex? He'll be gone for the rest of the day and we won't be disturbed."

"You bet, Dana. One hour. Long lunch hour. I'm yours, babe."

There was a wet sucking sound, the kind of sound he'd heard in cheap porn videos but never actually connected with real people, much less real people like his partner ... if the pod person currently playing tonsil hockey with the guy in the postal carrier's uniform was actually his partner. Dana? Since when did anyone call her Dana?

He stepped back from the kitchen, then deliberately bumped into the hall table before entering the room. Scully glanced over one tailored shoulder at him, then smiled down at the man at the base of the steps. "Thanks," she said sweetly.

"You're welcome, Mrs. Mulder, any time."

The honorific would have robbed Mulder of speech even if he hadn't seen the mailman's face. Alex Krycek tipped his hat at the horrified Mulder, gave Scully a truly lascivious wink, then headed down the walkway. He was wearing shorts. Short shorts. Short, blue, tight shorts. Mulder felt his groin give a leap of interest it hadn't even hinted at when Scully had broached him in the bedroom, and faced an uncomfortable truth.

Here, wherever here was, he had the hots for Krycek. Who was a mailman.

The children swirled around him again, and he counted heads this time. Stair-steps, from twelve to about five years old, the tallest four carrot tops and the shorter two ... dead ringers for Alex Krycek. Mulder gulped.

At least he wasn't the milkman. That would be one cliché too many.

Scully rounded on him, and he smiled sickly and ducked out the door, carried along on a wave of kids. He found himself alongside the fence without the slightest idea what to do next. The door shut behind him with a resounding thwack. As he stood there, trying to figure out the next logical step in this nightmare, the next door neighbor's back door opened, and Byers stepped out.

Mulder smiled his appreciation. Some things didn't change, no matter how whacked reality got. Byers was dressed in a neat brown suit with a neat brown tie, his brown hair neatly combed and his brown beard neatly trimmed. The Langley came out onto the step, grabbed hold of that neat brown head and kissed Byers like he was the last man on Earth.

The world shuddered. Or perhaps it was just Mulder. He could feel his jaw drop, but couldn't begin to summon the strength to close it, or to stop staring. Langley finally came up for air, patting Byers' hair down flat again, then glaring at Mulder. One fist went up in the air, and he yelped something about pride, and Mulder turned so fast he nearly impaled himself on the fence post heading for the front walk.

A man was waiting for him, leaning up against a dark sedan. Skinner looked normal, too, but Mulder wasn't taking any chances. Not after witnessing the love-in between two thirds of the Lone Gunmen.

"Sir?" he asked hesitantly. Skinner gave him a dirty look.

"Don't try to bullshit me, Fox," he growled.

Mulder blinked. Skinner called him Fox? What sort of rabbit hole had he fallen down?

"This is just a friendly reminder. You got one week. You don't come up with the money in one week, I pay you another little visit, and it ain't gonna be friendly, or pretty. You wanna keep your knees in one piece, you get Mr. Marlboro his money." Skinner glared at him with an effect that would make a basilisk turn puce with envy. Mulder nodded, not having the faintest clue what he was agreeing to, but willing to do just about anything to make Skinner go away. It worked.

Skinner stalked around the front of the sedan and got in the driver's side. As he was pulling away, the back window slid down silently, and Mulder choked. Cancerman was sitting there, smiling at him, in a compellingly threatening way.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Scully was the fishwife from hell -- _his_ fishwife from hell. Who was cuckolding him with Krycek, the mailman. The three of them, between them, had a passel of children who resembled a pack of raptors. He glanced over his shoulder and shuddered again. Frohicke had come out front of the house from which Byers had left. He was pruning roses.

He was also wearing plaid Bermuda shorts, a lime green polo shirt with a perky little embroidered logo on the chest, and bright teal high-topped sneakers. With yellow socks.

Mulder shuddered again. The Lone Gunmen as a menage a trois were poster children for the Suburban Gay Rights Movement. His erstwhile alien-napped / missing / dead /starlight-bound sister was a reject from the sixties, with enough illegal drugs growing in his back bedroom to send them all to prison for a nice long stretch. He looked down.

And he was wearing charcoal pinstripes. With a red power tie.

Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see X staring at him from a comfortable lean against a shady tree. Mulder's eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened. He strode over to his previously dead informant and planted himself in front of him, a determined look on his face.

"Okay, spill it. What the hell's going on? You're supposed to be dead. Scully's supposed to be my partner. Sam's supposed to be missing. Krycek's supposed to be ... somewhere else. I lost track. The Gunmen are supposed to be straight. And I'm supposed to be a special agent for the FBI." He glared at the man.

X looked back at him as if he'd grown a second head. Then he slowly straightened up and handed him a business card. Mulder glanced down at it.

"Linc's," he read aloud, "hot music and cold drinks." He glanced up. "Huh?" he asked, giving every evidence of years of training as an FBI interrogator and an Oxford-trained psychologist.

"Let me know if you still want that bar-tending job," X told him with a straight face. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

Mulder stared at the card in his hand, the cars lazily winding down the street, Frohicke merrily snipping rose heads, Krycek boldly trekking up his back walk to go schtup his wife. As he stood there, trying to find a way to wake up, he heard a shrill beeping. Tucking the card in his jacket pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open.

"Mulder," he said, head spinning.

"Ah, Fox," a light voice sang in his ear. He didn't recognize it. It didn't really matter -- he was ready to kill the next person who used his first name, anyway. "Heard about you getting laid off, man. Total bummer. Why don't you come by the office and we'll take a meeting?"

He listened numbly to the man chatting him up, automatically following instructions, noting directions. He climbed into a car he vaguely recognized, somehow unsurprised to find the key on his key chain worked in the ignition. As he drove downtown, along streets he knew but didn't recognize, he could feel reality gelling around him.

This was worse than an X File. This was real life.

Pulling up to the curb outside a small stucco office building, he got out of the car and stumbled up the walk. He didn't know when DC had morphed into LA, but for some odd reason it didn't feel as wrong as it really should have. He opened the door and walked through the foyer, ignoring the receptionist who ignored him in return. Leaning against the doorjamb of the inner office, he glared at the curly-headed blond man clicking away at the computer keyboard.

"What the hell is going on?" he growled. It came out closer to a whimper.

"I haven't got a clue!" Surfer-boy looked up and beamed sunnily at him. "Never have. Make it up as I go along. Figure they'll buy anything as long as it's murky enough, the clothes look cool, the music's spooky and there's lotsa blood and gore. Add another weirdo alien or knock Scully up for sweeps. Let all the guest stars do a script so I can take the day off and go surfing. Who needs continuity when you've got voice-overs? Who needs a plot when you've got special effects? Welcome to the network, Fox. Ain't the truth a bitch?"

If he'd had a gun, he'd've shot himself. As it was, he sat down, pulled a pile of scripts over to start reading, and wondered if Krycek was free for dinner.

(the end?)


End file.
